


Dying Inside

by redd093



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Fiction, Gen, General fiction, Literature, Short Stories, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 09:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1464511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redd093/pseuds/redd093
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I don't like doing this. I was feeling down, so I wrote something depressing. I'm all better now. It was just a moment of forgetting myself.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Dying Inside

**Author's Note:**

> I don't like doing this. I was feeling down, so I wrote something depressing. I'm all better now. It was just a moment of forgetting myself.

He was 20 years old, living in a single room apartment and working a minimum wage job, eating ramen every night. He had just finished his freshman year of college. He was going for a degree in journalism. He knew that it wouldn't get him very many jobs, but he just needed a steady one until he published a few books. That's what he did: he wrote stories. He lived for books. He wrote all day, and read all night (whenever he wasn't in class or working, of course). He came home from work one day and checked his mail to see that his final grades for the year had come in. He failed. The college told him that he had to write a letter telling of why he deserved a second chance, otherwise, he flunked out.  

He sat on the steps up to his apartment and read the letter. Then he re-read it. Then he crumpled it up and threw it into the street. And the nagging thought that had traveled with him since he was fourteen came surging back up to bite him again: Life is pointless. You're born, you spend your entire life trying to make money so you won't die, only to die of cancer, or (if you're lucky) old age anyway. So the smartest thing would be to just end it and stop the suffering, right? Well, that's where his other half kicked in. You see, as much as he'd enjoy just stopping the world, he despised the thought of suicide. Nothing in the world was more cowardly, stupid, and disrespectful. 

Suicide is cowardly because it's the ultimate in giving up. Suicide is stupid because it doesn't stop your life from getting worse, it ruins all chances of your life getting better. And suicide is disrespectful because there are so many people in this world literally struggling to just live through each day, counting it as an achievement if they can wake up the next morning. And on top of that, there are just so many people in this world who die before they can even experience any one of the amazing things this world has to offer. 

So there he was, sitting on the steps to his apartment, no clue what to do. Should he write the letter? Should he give up? He wanted to write, but that obviously wasn't going to bring in any money. Maybe he should quit on his dream and start another major in computer science instead? But where would he get the money? It was all just too much for him. He put his face in his hands and wept. And he died that day. Not literally, for he lived to be a nice and old eighty-two. No, he died in a different way. 

He stopped going to college. He continued to work at his minimum wage job, slowly rising up to be manager. He hated it. He managed to move out of the apartment into a real house, and stopped eating ramen every night. Eventually, he married a woman who he didn't love. They had two kids together, then she left him for a healthy computer programmer and took the kids and all of his money with her. He had to move back into that one room apartment and eat ramen every night again. He struggled to work up money again, now that he had to pay child support for two kids. Eventually, they grew up enough so that they didn't need child support, so he moved into a house of his own again. He tried dating, but was never successful. All the good women went after the men who weren't dead. Before too long, he grew a handsome sum of money and managed to retire. And not too long after that, he died physically as well.

Nobody attended his funeral.


End file.
